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JUST IN: Trump Makes Huge Move Approving Deportations For 1.5M Aliens

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President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security on Thursday moved to expel upwards of 1.5 million illegal immigrants from the U.S., escalating a mass deportation campaign that is already delivering the results he promised just days after he took office.

U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement reported that 538 illegal immigrants were apprehended and prioritized for deportation in the first 24 hours of its nationwide effort. White House border czar Tom Homan has insisted that simply pursuing individuals charged with violent crimes will keep ICE busy for the foreseeable future, but a new directive from DHS puts around 1.5 million more targets in their purview.

The parent agency of ICE has granted immigration officials permission to review the parole status of migrants who entered the U.S. under a series of expanded humanitarian asylum programs during the Biden-Harris administration. Reports of criminal behavior have followed Haitian and Venezuelan migrants, especially in places like Springfield, Ohio, Aurora, Colorado, and Boston, Massachusetts, where officials, residents, or President Trump himself have claimed that paroled gang members are terrorizing American citizens.

An internal memo signed Thursday states that acting DHS Secretary Benjamine Huffman has moved to take limits off expedited removal, which allows for the rapid deportation of new migrants if they fail to meet standards under the asylum programs. That power can now be implemented against any migrant for their first two years on U.S. shores.

Fox News reports that the memo also encourages ICE officials to “consider, in exercising your enforcement discretion, whether to apply expedited removal” to immigrants who may qualify but are omitted currently.

“This may include steps to terminate any ongoing removal proceeding and/or any active parole status,” it says.

In addition, the memo states that for any newly arrived migrant who has been granted parole under an existing program paused or terminated by the Trump administration, officials should “review the alien’s parole status to determine, in exercising your enforcement discretion, whether parole remains appropriate in light of any changed legal or factual status. ”

Secretary Huffman also notes that parole is a “positive exercise of enforcement discretion to which no alien is entitled and that parole ‘shall not be regarded as an admission of the alien.’”

Under President Joe Biden, asylum parole programs were expanded for migrants originating from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela (CHNV), Ukraine, and Afghanistan. Changes by DHS mean that CHNV entrants who were granted entry at a U.S. port after making an appointment on the recently terminated border control app may now be eligible for removal as well.

More than 1.5 million individuals entered either through the CBP One app or CHNV programs, which Republicans have accused President Biden of abusing in order to circumvent congressional solutions to the immigration crisis. The Biden-Harris administration maintained that such “lawful pathways” allowed officials to discourage illegal immigration.

The DHS memo claims that the asylum process “has been repeatedly abused by the Executive Branch over the past several decades in ways that are blatantly inconsistent with the statute.”

“Most important, the parole statute does not authorize categorical parole programs that make aliens presumptively eligible on the basis of some set of broadly applicable criteria,” it says.